by Anna Porter
THE MOST VIGOROUSLY promoted author of the late sixties and the seventies was Pierre Berton—Pooh Bear, as some of us called him behind his back. The Comfortable Pew was the first Berton book I read. Published in 1965 to howls of outrage from the religiously inclined, it had sold about 300,000 copies. I had not been religiously inclined since the year and a half I had spent as a charity-case boarder at the Sacred Heart Convent School in Wanganui. The standard uniform of pleated black skirt, black stockings, tie, and Panama hat inspired a rebellious spirit even in the otherwise placid New Zealand girls, let alone in someone like me, who was already rebellious. I had found the nuns sanctimonious and ignorant in about equal measure. They had stultifying attitudes toward women and work, and they taught creationism at a time when most people had at least heard of Darwin. In Hungary, where my general education began, there was, of course, no mention of the Bible when studying the beginning of time, but there were other nasty problems associated with living in a Communist dictatorship.
The Smug Minority was published the year before I arrived at M&S. It attacked the business elite for perpetuating out-of-date myths about women (place in the kitchen), work (its sanctity), poverty (it’s your own fault if you are poor), etc. Canada, Berton argued, had been held back by “selfish, narrow, short-sighted men unable to grasp the vision of the future, imprisoned by a bookkeeping attitude to life, creeping silently and blindly along at the tag end of the parade of progress.”
It had sold more than 100,000 copies.
Pierre was the ultimate nationalist, a man for his time, for the decade when Canadians became more confident than ever before (or since). I loved his defence of the RCMP: “To the Mounted Police, liberty was secondary to order; the pursuit of happiness was not as vital as the pursuit of peace and security. . . . In my country the Mountie image is sacrosanct.” He accused the Americans—Hollywood—of inventing a Mountie closer to their own beloved myth, a man who is stern, uncompromising, and always gets his man. Unlike American gunslingers, Canadian lawmen rarely reached for their guns. After all, it’s hard to reach for your gun while wearing two sets of mittens and a heavy parka.
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WHEN I DISCOVERED that Berton’s next highly anticipated manuscript was about the Canadian Pacific Railway, I assumed it would be long, boring, and corporate. It arrived on Christmas Eve 1969. I read it over Christmas and wrote Janet Craig, Berton’s own editor, that it was brilliant, riveting, vivid, and on such an unlikely subject that I hadn’t expected I would be captivated by it. The National Dream: The Great Railway, 1871–1881, of course, is not about the railway as much as it is about what it meant for Canadians to have a line connecting the country from east to west, a line that kept the expansionist Americans at bay.
The most obvious secret of Berton’s success is his style. He is a storytelling phenomenon. The National Dream is full of memorable characters, the men who dreamt that such a grand undertaking was possible, and the men whose talents and foibles are laid bare in the telling of their stories. Open the book and you will want to read on: “It is New Year’s Day, 1871, the year in which Canada will become a transcontinental nation, and in most of British North America it is bitterly cold. In Ottawa, where it is 18 below, the snow, gritty as sand, squeaks eerily beneath the felted feet of morning church-goers.” Or his description of Sir Charles Tupper, “a master of the bludgeon,” the “robust Nova Scotia doctor with the hard, unblinking eyes and the creased, pugnacious face.” No one had ever written Canadian history like this. It was not until I read Basil Johnston about a decade later that I wondered why Indigenous people were missing from Pierre’s grand narratives, as they were missing from most histories of that time.
I first met Pierre in his small office at the Royal York Hotel. He was a striking figure, six foot four, with white hair, bald patch covered by a careful comb-over, white mutton chop sideburns, usually a paisley silk bow tie, blue eyes, somewhat bronzed face (he wore makeup for television), and a bemused look that suggested he was interested in but unconvinced by whatever you said. He launched straight into a story about a BC cleric who had become a cult figure, and another about a hooker in the Klondike who became a millionaire. He was awkwardly flirtatious, though he also talked about his large family, and his wife, Janet, who was, he said, his best proofreader.
At some point he started to talk about his family’s planned travel down the Yukon River following his father’s route in 1898 to Dawson. The trip didn’t happen till later but, through the haze of the railway books, he was already thinking about it.I He always had several books percolating in his mind and kept his researchers hard at work collecting original material for future books.
I think Pierre had been favourably disposed to me because one of his best friends had been a Hungarian: George Feyer, a cartoonist and artist with an irrepressible sense of humour who had accompanied Pierre on a trip to Hungary. He had liked being with Feyer, so he had liked Budapest. Elsa Franklin, Berton’s manager, television producer, close friend, chief promoter, and business partner, hadn’t been on that trip and had no illusions about Hungarians.
The first time we met, she barely glanced at me, then handed Jack a manuscript and told him, “Tell your girl to take this and make a copy.” I had just been introduced as editorial director, but as far as Elsa was concerned, I was just an office girl.
All of Berton’s manuscripts were delivered on time, perfectly copied, with footnotes, bibliographies, acknowledgements in place, and usually accompanied by the redoubtable Elsa, whom the Star described as “a sexy, busty, green-eyed doll.” But she was nobody’s doll around M&S.
She had operated a small chain of bookstores in Vancouver and was confident she knew how to promote writers. Although she had had no television experience, she became the producer of The Pierre Berton Show and was now the force behind the hour-long interview series that had become a fixture on Canadian TV screens. It had been running since 1962 and displayed no sense of exhaustion. Pierre’s interview style was an easy combination: he challenged, probed, argued, expressed his own views, but always allowed his guests to express theirs. One still-fascinating example of a Berton interview: Bruce Lee in 1971. I would like to have watched live Mickey Spillane, David Niven, and Yousuf Karsh as well. It’s a pity that those archives are not accessible today.
Berton was also a member of the Front Page Challenge panel—one of the longest-running television shows in North America. Guests included such luminaries as Malcolm X, Errol Flynn, and Indira Gandhi.
In 1969 it was impossible to walk or drive around Toronto without bumping into Pierre’s face. He was on streetcar ads, placards, billboards, and on top of his newspaper column five times a week. While pursuing his TV career, public speaking gigs, daily columns, and tireless publicity tours, he managed to write a book a year. (M&S’s shaky finances—his sales accounted for about 20 per cent of the company’s income— depended on his annual miracles.) He wrote them all with prodigious speed. Jack once called him “a writing factory.”
Many of our authors felt that Berton’s influence had become too great and that Elsa’s persistent demands on his behalf exacerbated his tendencies to require royal treatment. Even Charles Templeton, Berton’s friend and co-debater on the CFRB radio show they jointly hosted, was concerned that Elsa might alienate potential allies, although in fact Pierre’s career did not seem to suffer.
Despite all the attention paid to his and Elsa’s every request, Berton complained ceaselessly in long angry letters to Jack, who was afraid that Berton could easily find another publisher. It was his fear of Berton’s wrath that led Jack to fire Catherine Wilson, our much-loved head of publicity. Elsa Franklin had accused her of botching Elsa’s preparations for a Berton launch party by scheduling for the same evening a launch for poet John Newlove’s impressive but very bleak poetry collection Lies.II As everyone at M&S realized, Catherine would not have been aware of Elsa’s plans, but Jack told me he had no option but to comply with the pressure to let Catherine go. I th
ink Peter Taylor never forgave Jack for instructing him to deliver the bad news to Catherine.
After that debacle, Farley Mowat threatened to sever his ties with Jack and he ended whatever friendship he had enjoyed with Pierre and Elsa. Frankly, I didn’t think there was much of a friendship between them in the first place. They were rivals for the top of the bestseller lists and rivals also for attention at McClelland & Stewart.
The Bertons’ summer lawn parties at their Kleinburg home were a veritable smorgasbord of Canada’s who’s who. Invitees included the McClellands and the Bodsworths;III political journalist Allan Fotheringham, sportswriter Trent (Bill) Frayne,IV and June Callwood;V radio producer Geraldine Sherman and Bob Fulford; the Haileys;VI Fred Davis;VII Betty Kennedy;VIII writer Sylvia Fraser; CBC’s Knowlton Nash and Lorraine Thomson; sometimes Harold Town and Murray and Barbara Frum; always Charles Templeton, Elsa Franklin, and others in the Berton-Franklin firmament.
As for any personal relationship between Elsa and Pierre, though speculations abounded, I never saw them as much as embrace. What I did know was that whenever Elsa called late in the evening and I was still in my office, Jack asked me to tell her Pierre was in a meeting and would call her back as soon as he was free. It was a favour Jack had asked and, since my own grandfather had been a legendary philanderer, I thought I understood why.
Pierre and Jack had been founding members of the Sordsmen’s Club, a men’s group that met once a month for lavish lunches in upscale restaurants. Members took turns making up the guest list. Women guests were welcome but wives were not. It was understood that each woman could, if she wished, spend extra time with a man who had been at the lunch, not necessarily the one who brought her, though I am told few ever did. I gather it was very elegant and a great deal of fun for all, but when I told Jack I had been invited by Pierre, he sternly forbade it. Definitely not the place, he said, for a vice president of M&S.IX
Not surprisingly, having been born in Dawson, Pierre loved Robert Service poems about the “men who moil for gold,” and the women they loved.
There are strange things done in the midnight sun
By the men who moil for gold;
The Arctic trails have their secret tales
That would make your blood run cold; . . .
Pierre’s reciting of the Sam McGee poem was the best version you could ever hope to hear. The stories he told, and the way he told them (in the books and on the screen) were vastly different from the stories kids had studied at school or heard from their parents. After Pierre, Jack said, Canada’s history would never be dull again.
Sadly, he was wrong. Those schools that still bother to teach Canadian history have managed to return students to how it used to be written before Pierre, a bloodless version with cardboard figures and dull dates.
But back in the early 1970s it seemed as if we were at the beginning of a new era when our history would be exciting. Both The National Dream and its sequel The Last Spike were runaway bestsellers. Both were selections of the Book of the Month Club, thus adding about 40,000 copies to the first printings.
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I. Drifting Home, published in 1973, is still my favourite of Berton’s sixty or so books. It’s the most personal, the most affectionate toward his family, and the least concerned about presenting wild men with wild dreams—other than, perhaps, his own.
II. Lies won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry.
III. Fred Bodsworth’s most famous book is Last of the Curlews—one of the most moving nature books I have ever read. He could imitate fifty or more birdsongs and could spot a silent bird even in thick foliage.
IV. His friends were encouraged to call him Bill and he was, I think, the best Canadian sportswriter of the last century.
V. June called Bill “Dreamy.”
VI. Arthur Hailey, the author of blockbusters such as Hotel and Airport, had been a good friend of Pierre’s since his days as a lowly journalist in Canada.
VII. Front Page Challenge ringmaster.
VIII. Front Page Challenge panellist.
IX. It’s hard to remember the succession of titles or the reasons for my rapid rise to vice president, editor-in-chief, and member of the beleaguered board of M&S directors dealing with the cash crunches and worries about bank credit lines. Titles were cheap at M&S.
How Pierre Berton Is Responsible for My Marriage
EVERY YEAR THE challenge for Peter Taylor was to come up with new ideas to promote Pierre’s books. He created some of the craziest scenes book reviewers and columnists had ever witnessed. One early example was the massive cake with ten thousand candles intended to celebrate the ten-thousand-copy first printing of Berton’s The Last Spike: The Great Railway 1881–1885 in 1971. It was wheeled in to Les Cavaliers on Church Street, the only restaurant brave enough to risk the fire that would surely follow.
It took two fire extinguishers to put out the conflagration.
I have a photograph from the event, taken just before the fire. Pierre, Peter Newman, and I are outfitted in period costume. The photo, appearing in Toronto Life’s social column, prompted a recently divorced young lawyer to phone and ask me for a date. Since we hadn’t met before, he suggested I talk to theatre critic Nathan Cohen, who would vouch that he was a fine fellow. At the time M&S was courting Cohen, the most popular, wittiest theatre reviewer in the country, trying to persuade him to write a book about Canadian theatre. It was a strange call. Julian Porter, Cohen assured me, was a likeable, good-looking, quasi-establishment figure—“quasi” because he chose to be—who could be trusted to keep his distance on a first date. He had been a star of the Hart House debating team, had a fine legal mind and, Cohen said, a quick wit.
It turned out to be much more than a date, but I couldn’t have known that at the time. Julian seemed to be everything Cohen had promised and somewhat more. He was attractive, big, blue-eyed, with thick, silvery-brown hair and a firm but not bone-crushing handshake. He had the build of a football player. He had been school captain at UTS, a football player in high school, and a member of the Varsity Blues at university.
I didn’t realize how nervous he was until we arrived at his chosen restaurant on Yorkville and he had some difficulty helping me out of my coat. Our date went steadily downhill after his preordered meal of pheasant in plum sauce arrived. As a rule, I disliked men who ordered meals for me and I have hated pheasant ever since a weekend in Scotland with my Scottish boyfriend in 1967. He had been quite charming but his family loved to shoot things. Spending most of the day with the “beaters,” I managed to shoo some of the smarter pheasants in the opposite direction from where the men with guns waited for them to rise from the gorse and be blasted to smithereens. To top it off, the stupider pheasants, baked still full of buckshot, were served on pretty blue-and-white plates for supper.
Luckily Julian had also preordered the wine: a fine Montrachet, which came in a silver bucket of ice. Luckily because Julian, even more nervous after hearing about my Scottish experience, kicked over the bucket, the ice skedaddled across the floor, the wine spilled, and we fell in love.
His pedigree was, indeed, as establishment as Nathan Cohen had told me. His father had been chief justice of Ontario and minister of several portfolios in Leslie Frost’s cabinet; his mother was the daughter of an admiral in the British navy. Julian was born in deepest Rosedale and could give a guided tour of the area, including who lived where and what they all did. But he was also fond of carnivals—he was Jimmy Conklin’s lawyer—and took me for a ride on the then-highest roller coaster in North America. He had been lead counsel in a case defending art dealer Dorothy Cameron against obscenity charges over her 1965 erotic art exhibition Eros 65. The police had raided her gallery and seized several pieces of art deemed to be obscene. We still own one of those pieces: a large black-and-white of two nude women by Robert Markle.
He told me he had stammered when he was a child. As head boy at UTS, his job included reading out the list of boys in attendance. Those whose names st
arted with sibilants never made the list.
He was a reader. He usually had two or three books on the go at the same time, and in 1971 he had been reading Raymond Chandler, Dante’s Inferno, Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim, and one of the James Bond books. He had been a young tour guide and talked about art and artists with great passion and knowledge. He still does. Like all the people I have loved, he is a terrific storyteller.
He had already been married to the daughter of another scion of the Toronto establishment (her father was senator, politician, former cabinet minister, and Tory leadership contestant Wallace McCutcheon) and was divorced with two children, so I felt reassured that he wouldn’t want to marry again. I had no interest in marriage. His two daughters, just four and eight at the time, viewed me with overt suspicion. They had not been keen on the divorce and were still hoping that their parents would be reconciled one day. We would travel to various small-town Conklin carnivals, the girls sitting in the back in stony silence until it was late, when four-year-old Jessica would climb to the front seat to sleep on my lap. Suse, the eight-year old, preferred to sleep in the back.
I contrived to be less absorbed in my work than usual.
After the fire, the rest of Pierre’s author tour was a resounding success. It featured Winnipeg goldeyes, New Brunswick fiddleheads, and wild blackberry pie, plus Last Spike cocktails—champagne, Curaçao, and orange bitters—served at breakfasts of buckwheat pancakes and maple syrup to bleary-eyed media types across the country.
There were massive lineups outside stores where Pierre was signing his books. At Bolen’s in Victoria he managed to sign more than four hundred copies of The Last Spike before they ran out of books. Independent bookstores across the country (and there were many of them in the seventies) featured both history books in their windows, and the bookstore chains placed massive orders that they backed with advertising at their own expense. Today the one remaining bookstore chain tends to look for advertising dollars from publishers who want their books to sell.